The second part of Ludlow 38’s film series will be Joost Conijn’s video installation Siddieqa, Firdaus, Abdallah, Soelayman, Moestafa, Hawwa and Dzoel-Kifl (2004). The film features a group of seven Dutch children growing up in an atypical Islamic family on a squatted site near Amsterdam. The protagonists are seemingly abandoned in the world. The carefree joyful children appear to be shipwrecked in a 21st century urban environment where they do as they please – playing, exploring, eating, and sleeping without adult supervision.
Siddieqa, Firdaus, Abdallah, Soelayman, Moestafa, Hawwa and Dzoel-Kifl continues Conijn’s interest in the coexistence and chance encounters between different ethnicities and religions, and argues that anti-authoritarian education is still alive somewhere at the fringes of contemporary society.
Joost Conijn was born in 1971; he lives and works in Amsterdam. In 2007 the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam showed a larger body of his works in a one-person show. He recently participated in the group show Play Safe at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin.
